Ryan's 5th B-Day Cake: 2 6" circles for the bottom tier with fondant & fondant cut-outs. On the other side, there were coins and also a star that said "5 UP". The Mario was fun to make and it was Ryan's absolute favorite part of the cake. He even ate some of it. The top tier was a Barbie skirt pan that I trimmed down a tiny bit to make it a little more round. I found a cool trick to make a good red color for fondant! I used extra pink fondant that I had lying around, put in some burgandy to give it a deeper red color and then put in a lot of no-taste red and the color came out great.
Quinn's 18th B-day cake: 3 inch deep - 10 inch cake cut in half for the cookie layers and a 2 inch deep - 9 inch round for the middle. I should have cut the 9 inch down about 1/2 - 1 inch because it looked like a quadruple-stuffed oreo! I covered the 2 10 inch halves and then just iced the middle layer with swiss meringe to make it look like real Oreo stuffing. I iced the middle layer before layering in the bottom 10 inch but there was still a little clean up after I got it on there. Plus, I had 2 filling layers to cover up once it got on the cake. There was no supports necissary although the middle layer did get a bit squished. I refrigerated it so the middle layer wouldn't crack. If I was doing it for a client, I probably would have put supports through the 9 and bottom 10 inch tiers just so the middle layer wouldn't crack. All the detail work is actually in fondant. No piping. I didn't feel like making royal icing and trying to get it the exact color as the fondant so I just rolled very thin ropes of fondant on my wonderful Ateca fondant mat. That mat really makes rolling ropes a lot easier for some reason. It's far from perfect but it turned out pretty good. I LOVE doing "Imitations of Life"-type decorating. I think it's my favorite medium.
